Built an app after buying one from competitor

Maryna Klokova — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:40:34 +0000

After 1 year of building in public I finally learned that it’s better to pay for a product if it saves you time, than trying to build one from scratch. Even if you are a Software developer. Unless you want to have fun, of course.

If the product is good, it won’t be a 2 day job. And even then, better check how the price tag on existing solution matches your hour rate. Maybe paying for solution on the market actually saves you money.

I needed a screen recording app for my Mac to record demos of my products. Tried several solutions. Most of them had subscription. They had nothing special.

I’ve already created a prototype of my recorder, but then decided I have no time for it and bought one that was quite popular among software builders on X.

At first I was happy I had it. But soon I became quite disappointed.
An app that was out there for more than a year was buggy, bulky and just inconvenient.
Huge download size (300+MB), even bigger app size (500+MB), projects are enormous even for a tiny portion of screen recorded.

I couldn’t record sound from headphones, and many other things didn’t work or weren’t there. Some were quite irritating, like playback starting after project is loaded into editor. Which took a long time, I could forget I was recording something before and be out of my room, when suddenly sound started coming from my laptop.

Moreover, output still looked far from what I wanted.

I decided to push my project further. “If that thing could bring constant income to maker, what I have in mind for sure must be more helpful to people” — I thought.

So I’ve built a native, tiny and performant macOS solution. It’s lightning fast and here are the measurements against competitors:

Download size: 3 MB, ~ 100+ times smaller
Installed app size: 9 MB, ~ 50+ times smaller
Project size for 1h small screen area recording: 200 MB, ~30+ times smaller

But the more important thing: I enjoyed every bit of development and every second of using the app.

Here’s how it looks now:

Setup screen — what you see before recording Press enter or click to view image in full size

What you see while recording: microfone levels, pause and stop. There’s also a camera on top if you turned it on and a recorded region, if you are recording specific area. It’s glassy transparent. You can drag it over your screen to make sure it doesn’t bother you.

Editor which opens the next second after recording is stopped. You can change camera shape, crop the video, change background, add shadows, padding, corner radius to it and much more.

If you want to try it and record demo, tutorial or presentation, there are no watermarks for first free 3 exports — they are fully yours. Then I ask for a one-time price that is the lowest right now for first users.

Link: https://screenrecords.app

DEV Community: Maryna Klokova

Built an app after buying one from competitor